DemonTPx.com

Control Spotify and Pulseaudio with a Behringer X-Touch One

Sat, 02 May 2020 17:30:35 +0200

I've recently bought a Behringer X-Touch One MIDI DAW controller to control REAPER when I'm recording audio. After the Covid-19 lockdown started, we were told to work from home. I got a Intel NUC from work to take home and connected it to my monitor and bought a USB switch box to switch my keyboard and mouse between my home PC and my work NUC. Because my speakers are connected to my home PC, I was running Spotify from there and controlled it using either my tablet or the Spotify web player on my work NUC. This worked allright, but I wanted to be able to more quickly pause, play or skip a track. Using the X-Touch One for this seemed like a perfect solution. Using Python and mido I could control everything on the controller and listen for inputs from it. After that I found out that media players on Linux Mint can be controlled using D-Bus and the dbus-python library. After I got it all set up, I could control Spotify with the controller and information about the current song playing was sent to the display of the controller. I made the text in the display scrollable using the knob above it. The next thing I wanted to do was control the audio volume with the slider. I achieved this using the pulsectl library to get the current main audio sinks volume, setting the slider to it and update the volume when the slider moved. Then I wanted to allow other media players using D-Bus to be able to be controlled. With some more work I was able to control them all. Chrome, VLC, XPlayer, Rhythmbox, Celluloid. They all worked thanks to D-Bus. The last thing that bugged me at that point was that it was becoming a bit of a mess in de code. I had to run a GLib MainLoop, or else DBus would not work. I had to connect to PulseAudio twice because I could not wait for events and write to it at the same time in a single connection. Also I wanted to compile a to a single static binary so I would not need to install a whole development environment every time I wanted to install the program. That's when I decided to rewrite the whole thing in Go. And so I did using the gomidi, godbus and pulseaudio libraries. It solved all of these problems. I have it working now for two weeks, use it every day while working and had no problems at all. The source code is available on Github: The python version: DemonTPx/midi-dbus-controller The go version: DemonTPx/midi-media-controller

Fix slow scrolling in Chrome on Linux

Sat, 02 May 2020 16:50:19 +0200

Scrolling is really slow in Chrome on Linux. At about 55 pixels per scroll input, you really have to scroll a lot to get anywhere quick. Chrome used to have a --scroll-pixels option, which I added in my application launch configuration, but they've taken that out a few years ago. There are some threads to be found about this subject and the solutions usualy are to use imwheel to replace the scrolling input with keyboard down arrow inputs or to install a Chrome extension like SmoothScroll and just increase the speed there. Both aren't ideal. Imwheel for example doesn't work right when the cursor is in a text box and the extensions are all a bit slow and sluggish when pages are still loading. The SmoothScroll extension also sometimes just pops up its own website in a new tab, which I find very irritating. Since there seems no way to just fix it directly in Chrome itself, I decided to write an extension which would only increase the scrolling speed. It is based on the SmoothScroll extension, but strips off all the stuff it doesn't need. You can only configure the speed factor and that's it. The extension essentially also disables smooth scrolling, but I don't care for that anyway. The Scroll Speed Chrome extension can now be found in the Chrome web store and the source on github.

SteelSeries Arctis 5 and 7 now supported by Ubuntu!

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 23:06:02 +0100

Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic), Linux Mint 19 and newer releases now officially support the SteelSeries Arctis 5 and 7. On bionic, the pulseaudio package should at least be updated to 11.1-1ubuntu7.2 to add support for it. Be sure to remove the deb I've created before updating, to prevent a conflict: dpkg --remove pulseaudio-steelseries-arctis-5 Here is the Launchpad bug which caused the Arctis profiles to be added: #1758736 Please note that the newer 2019 model of the Arctis is not supported, but you can create the file /lib/udev/rules.d/91-pulseaudio-steelseries-arctis-5.rules with the following content to enable support: ATTRS{idVendor}=="1038", ATTRS{idProduct}=="12aa", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="steelseries-arctis-5-usb-audio.conf"

Launch SSH improved keyboard navigation and natural sort

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 01:03:34 +0200

I've added some updates to Launch SSH and bumped the version to 0.1.2. The keyboard navigation has received a small update as the PAGE DOWN, PAGE UP, HOME and END keys are now functional. Also, when a history item is selected and RETURN is pressed, that session is now launched instead of whats in the input box. Another small new feature is natural sorting in the history. For example if you were to have 20 webservers called web1, web2, all the way up to web20, it would previously sort like this: web1, web10, web11, .... From now on it will be sorted in a more natural way like this: web1, web2, ..., web9, web10, ..., web19, web20. Finally, I've no longer created a deb installer for Ubuntu artful, but did created one for Ubuntu bionic, which is about to be released today! You can find the installers here: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic DEB installer (.deb, 38Kb) Ubuntu 16.04 xenial DEB installer (.deb, 38Kb) Source (.tar.gz, 9Kb) Source (.zip, 15Kb)

Launch SSH 0.1 released

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:52:11 +0200

More than ten years after the final release for Geek Launcher, I've finally put some sort of a spiritual successor together called Launch SSH. I mainly used Geek Launcher to launch SSH sessions, back in the day when I still used Windows XP a lot. It mostly just invoked PuTTy with the hostname of the machine I wanted to connect to. Quickly launching other types of applications was still useful back then, but has been totally unnecessary for the last few years since Windows 7 came with a useful start menu which could quickly filter through and launch applications. MacOS has similar functionality with spotlight and Gnome, Cinnamon and KDE (and other desktop environments) on linux also have their own ways of launching applications in a similar fashion. However, launching ssh sessions was still not as easy as it was using my Geek Launcher and Launch SSH is trying to fix that. The idea is that you install this package and add a global hotkey in the desktop environment to launch the application. After that you get a window with an input box and a list box which will fill up with hostnames you've connected to recently. After you've connected to a few machines, the history should fill up. And that's where the efficiency should come from. Because you can navigate quickly through the list using the arrow keys and launch a session using the RETURN key and you can also quickly find the session you want using autocomplete (bound to the TAB key.) Removing items from the history is also easy and can be done using the DELETE key. This should make starting new SSH session a breeze. Go try it out and tell me what you think. You can find it on my github or download it here: Ubuntu 16.04 xenial DEB installer (.deb, 38Kb) Ubuntu 17.10 artful DEB installer (.deb, 32Kb) Source (.tar.gz, 7Kb) Source (.zip, 12Kb)

Improve PulseAudio Arctis 5 support

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:25:46 +0100

After I got the chat and game output to work on my SteelSeries Arctis 5 on Ubuntu, I tried sending a patch to the PulseAudio maintainers to include it in the distribution by default. PulseAudio maintainer Tanu Kaskinen pointed out to me that I had to use two separate (custom) output paths. Fixing this caused the outputs to be selected more easily in sound configuration dashboards. For example in the gnome sound configuration screen: The names steelseries-arctis-5-output-* aren't pretty, but to change that, pulseaudio would need to be recompiled. I played around with the profile configuration and configured which elements belong to which output. The game output is linked to the PCM element and the chat output is linked to the Com Speaker element. After configuring this correctly I noticed that the chat output volume slider now goes a lot louder than before and they don't interfere with each other. Some welcome improvements! I've immediately released an updated version of my distributed version: Download the updated version for debian, ubuntu and linux mint: pulseaudio-steelseries-arctis-5_0.2_all.deb

SteelSeries Arctis 5 on Ubuntu

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 16:23:55 +0100

A while ago, I bought a new gaming headset, the SteelSeries Arctis 5. One of the main reasons I got is, was the "ChatMix Dial", a physical knob which can mix two audio outputs. Turning it to the left gives you more game sound, turning it to the right gives you more voice chat sound. This works fine on Windows. It recogizes the two audio outputs and you can mix between them. On Ubuntu however, it doesn't. The only output it enables is the voice chat output and the microphone work. The game output stays hidden. A simple solution I took some time trying to figure out how to fix this and found out that ALSA recognizes the game output, but pulseaudio does not. Yesterday I found an article about the Arctis 7 headset on Ubuntu by Johan Heikkilä and decided to try out the solutions he'd come up with. His first solution was using this command: pacmd load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,1 I've had to change the device address to hw:2,1 for mine to work and this added an extra audio device in my sound settings screen that enabled the game audio output. The main problem with this approach is that once you reboot or unplug and plug in the device, it no longer comes up and you need to enter the command again for it to show up again. A better (more sophisticated) solution The second solution Johan added involved adding a pulseaudio profile file, a udev rule and some configuration to go with it. After putting all these files in place, I needed to change the product id in the udev rule from 1260 to 1250 so it matches the Arctis 5 and enables the profile: ATTRS{idVendor}=="1038", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1250", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="steelseries-arctis-usb-audio.conf" This did something! The game output was now enabled and the sound overall was a bit louder. However, the voice chat output and microphone input now were no longer working. After that I figured out that the profile expects a mono output for the voice chat, but the Arctis 5 seems to have stereo. After changing that, everything worked. The result I've cleaned up the configuration and pushed it to a repository on github, along with a deb file for easy installation on Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. The repository can be found here: DemonTPx/steelseries-arctis-5-pulseaudio-profile Download the deb: pulseaudio-steelseries-arctis-5_0.1_all.deb After installing, and reconnecting the headset, it should enable the game output by default. In apps like Discord, the voice chat output should also be available to be selected as output:

Local Symfony development with Docker Compose

Thu, 04 May 2017 21:46:41 +0200

I've been using a combination of Vagrant, Virtualbox and Ansible for a while now when developing my Symfony (and other PHP) applications and it has worked out just fine. Ever since I heard about Docker a few years ago, it seemed like a good idea, but a bit of a pain to set up and manage. But when my colleague Jordy showed me Docker Compose last week, which seemed a lot simpler and faster than my current flow, I was eager to try that out. Docker vs Vagrant At work our projects are quite complex and require a lot of different services like RabbitMQ, Couchbase and Elasticsearch, but my personal project are much more traditional, requiring only a webserver, PHP and MySQL. Fact of the matter is that I could reuse the same Vagrant/Ansible configuration for all my projects, and it would work just fine. However, there are a few problems with that. Every vagrant box I spawn needs a whole operating system to run, a disk image containing said OS and the CPU and RAM resources to run it. When I use Docker, I can use the same image per service (eg. MySQL or nginx) and they would only use that diskspace once. It also doesn't need a whole operating system to run, since it runs isolated on my already running Linux kernel. Aside from that, starting up a few Docker containers is much quicker than booting a whole virtual machine with a lot of services (and some stuff I don't really need.) My Docker Compose setup In the root of my project I added a docker-compose.yml file which contains something like this. (I stripped it down a bit and made it more generic...) # docker-compose.yml version: '3' services: mysql: image: mysql:5.7 ports: - 3306:3306 volumes: - myproject_mysql:/var/lib/mysql environment: MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: rootpassword MYSQL_DATABASE: myproject MYSQL_USER: myproject MYSQL_PASSWORD: myproject nginx: image: nginx:1.12-alpine ports: - 8080:80 volumes: - ./docker/nginx/vhost.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro - ./:/code links: - php php: build: docker/php volumes: - ./:/code volumes: myproject_mysql: driver: local I defined a volume called myproject_mysql and mounted it in the mysql service on /var/lib/mysql. This is the path where MySQL stores all its data. By mounting the volume, we persist the data outside of the Docker container. This makes sure the data is saved when the container is shut down and started up again. The mysql and nginx services are quite straight forward and use images directly from the Docker Hub with some custom configuration. You can tell because it uses the image: directive. I also mounted the ./docker/nginx/vhost.conf file into the nginx container. I used the nginx vhost file provided in the Symfony documentation and changed server_name to _ and root to /code/web. The php service is different, because it needs to be built. The build: directive tells Docker Compose where it can find the Dockerfile containing the steps to build the container. In this case it is in docker/php/Dockerfile, relative to the docker-compose.yml file. It might contain the following: # docker/php/Dockerfile FROM php:7-fpm RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \ git \ zlib1g-dev \ libicu-dev \ libxml2-dev \ libaio1 \ vim \ unzip RUN docker-php-ext-install \ pdo \ pdo_mysql \ opcache \ intl \ xml RUN docker-php-ext-enable \ pdo \ pdo_mysql \ intl \ xml RUN usermod -u 1000 www-data WORKDIR /code The FROM directive tells on which Docker image it should be based. These images are also the ones you can find in the Docker Hub. The RUN directives run a command inside the container. As you probably can tell, the RUN commands I defined install and enable some PHP extensions. The RUN usermod -u 1000 www-data is a bit a hack, by the way. Symfony writes cache and logs to the var directory and to prevent permission problems, we'll just give the www-data user in the container the same uid as the user I'm using on my PC. You should note that if your uid is not 1000, this will not work for you and you'll need to change it accordingly. WORKDIR finally set the default working directory. Running the containers Once the docker-compose.yml, the docker/php/Dockerfile and docker/nginx/vhost.conf files are in place, we can start up the containers. You can use the following command to start all containers in foreground mode: docker-compose up In foreground mode, the logs for all containers will be shown as if you were using tail -f. If you press CTRL-C, the containers will shut down. What I prefer to do is run the containers in detached mode: docker-composer up -d This will start the containers and return to your shell after that. If you want to see the latest logs, you can run: docker-compose logs Or you could follow (tail -f) the logs by adding -f. Shut everything down using: docker-compose down By adding -v, you'll also delete the volumes you've defined. Accessing the webserver, php or mysql Now you've got your containers running, you might want to access the webserver to check if your project still runs correctly. Since we've added some port mappings in the docker-compose.yml file, you'll easily be able to. On the nginx we've mapped port 8080 to 80. This means you can access http://localhost:8080 and it maps to port 80 inside the nginx container. We did the same on the mysql container, mapping localhost:3306 or mysql://localhost to port 3306 inside the container. That will allow you to access your mysql server using something like DBeaver or MySQL Workbench. You may also run your Symfony console commands from inside the php container. You can do this using this command: docker-compose exec --user www-data php bin/console The --user www-data argument ensures you don't get the permission issues I described earlier. Conclusion This is all a whole lot faster than what I was used to when running Vagrant boxes. I also found it quite easy to set up. Switching between versions of services has also been made much easier since we no longer depend on a base operating system anymore. The only problem I was stuck on quite a while was the permissions problem, but settings the uid of the www-data user to my local hosts user id and using --user www-data when running php commands from inside the php box seems to be a nice and simple solution.

Getting MP3 CDs to work with my car stereo

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 20:14:26 +0100

A few years back I bought an Opel Astra H from 2008 and it has the CD30 MP3 audio system. Which means that it will play MP3s burned on a CD. So one of the first things I tried was burning a few albums on a CD and play it in my car. There were some problems. Some of the files wouldn't play correctly and some other wouldn't play at all. Most files would play, but showed a garbled mess where the track name should be. I naturally tried figuring out how I could make all MP3s (and meta data) work... using linux and a few command line tools! As it turned out, it only supports MP3s encoded with a constant bit rate (CBR) and ID3v1 tags for the meta data. Most MP3s I download are in variable bit rate (VBR) and have ID3v2 tags with propably some album art in it or something. Fixing the audio I first tried converting the files to a 192kbps CBR format using avconv: $ avconv -i filename-in.mp3 -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k -vn filename-out.mp3 This made sure that the audio would always play correctly, but the meta data would still not be shown correctly. I knew I needed to convert it to ID3v1 and strip off all the rest. Stripping off the rest I found another tool which can manipulate and strip off id3-tags and other meta data from MP3s: eyeD3. You can delete anything you don't need on your car stereo using the following commands: $ eyeD3 --remove-comments --remove-lyrics --remove-images filename-out.mp3 $ eyeD3 --to-v1.1 filename-out.mp3 $ eyeD3 --remove-v2 filename-out.mp3 This also fixed the meta data problem. Speeding it up When I finally had all of this working, I had it set up so that I could drop some files in a folder, run a script and receive the converted files in another folder. The script only processed the files sequentially. I noticed that only one of my CPU cores was occupied when converting the files, so I knew that this could be sped up by making use of all cores. I found another cool little tool called GNU Parallel which very simply enabled this for me: $ find "in" -type f | parallel ./convert-one.sh "{}" Now it runs about four times faster since I have four logical CPU cores in my PC. Find the scripts on GitHub I've put the final scripts on GitHub. Just throw some albums or random MP3 files in the in directory, run ./convert-all.sh and, once the script is done, they'll be converted and ready in the out directory.

Easy Twig: Create static twig websites with ease

Sat, 09 Jul 2016 21:31:47 +0200

About a year ago we were about to create our new company website. My colleague Jeroen, who is on front-end development, was assigned with this task. Jeroen also wanted to learn more about the Twig template engine at that time. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone by quickly creating a framework which made it very easy for Jeroen to create the website using Twig. Easy Twig is what I've come up with. It allows you to very quickly build static websites in the same way you would when using plain HTML, but with the advantage of Twig. That means that you can make use of template inheritance, includes, macros, and more! Check the project out on Github. Also check out my companies shiny website, which is built using Easy Twig!

Redone my whole website!

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 23:56:25 +0200

It has been quite some time (five years!) since I last posted something here, but here it is. I've completely redone my website, made it responsive, added in some Symfony and Bootstrap love and it should now be ready for the future. I've also updated a lot of the outdated pages that are on here. Replaced a lot of links from SVN to GIT and from SourceForge to GitHub! Maybe I'll be posting some more stuff here as well!

New version for Music Importer

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:47:25 +0100

I've made a few changes to Music Importer again. The album artist field can now be edited and used for restructuring. This is very handy if you are to restructure compilation albums. Check it out on the Music Importer page.

A new Smash Battle release in a long while

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:53:16 +0100

It has been a long time since we last released a Smash Battle update, but here it is! All the updates in the new release are a bit old ones too. The snow levels, new soundtrack, laser and shield power-ups have been in the repository for over a year. Download it from the Smash Battle website or from sourceforge and let me know if you think.

Rock de IJmond website online

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:02:08 +0100

A bit of a late post, but the Rock de IJmond website is finally online. I've been working on this for quite some time and am very pleased with the results. Also thanks to Jeroen Groeneweg who redid the design a day after the site was launched. Rock de IJmond is now only a website which contains an archive of all rock, metal, punk and hardcore bands from the IJmond area and a calendar for shows in these genres in de IJmond, Haarlem, Zaanstreek and Alkmaar area. With this site I hope to get some more exposure for bands from the area and a central place for all bands from the IJmond. Ultimately I want to set up a Rock de IJmond festival. But that's all for the future. Go check the site out and let me know what you think.

Stare of Displeasure website online

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:23:52 +0100

My friends of Stare of Displeasure finally have a website. I've made them a copy of my own bands website and redid some stuff to match their band. Check these guys out if you can; they'll be playing the Til Trophy finals in the Flinty's in Haarlem in a few weeks. I'm sure their show will blow you away!

Another few bugfixes for Slider Puzzle

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:15:06 +0100

Another version, another few bugs squashed! You can now also install Slider Puzzle on your SD card, when you're running out of space on your device. And last, but not least, I redid the icons so they look sharper. Go check it out!

Some small updates for Slider Puzzle

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:26:10 +0100

To this date, Slider Puzzle been downloaded 1150 times, which is a bit more than I expected! Today I've released the updated version 1.03. The update features the following changes: You can now choose easy, medium or hard on random and photo levels, there are eight new predefined levels, tiles no longer jump to their place when you release them, but ease to it and the device will vibrate when you're trying to move a lock. So once again, let me know what you think of the updates and what updates you'd like to see! UPDATE 2/11: It's one day later and slider puzzle now has been downloaded 1800 times. That's 650 times in one day! :) Also I've updated it to 1.04, which shows a white flash on tiles you slide to the right spot.

Slider Puzzle now available

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:50:51 +0200

The first version of Slider Puzzle now available from the Android Market for free! It is still a bit short on predefined levels, but you can generate a random level or play with a photo from your album for endless fun! I will be adding a lot more predefined levels later on and I might add some other stuff, like tiles that can only move horizontally or vertically in stead of both ways. If you have any good ideas to make the game better, I'd love to hear them! (More information about Slider Puzzle)

First steps in Android development: Slider Puzzle

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:08:35 +0200

After my iPhone broke on me a few weeks ago, I bought an HTC Desire with Android 2.2. Of course, one of the first thing I had to do was download and play with the SDK. After a few hello world applications I started on a game after the idea of my brother. He originally wanted me to create the game for the iPhone, but since you'd have to buy a Mac just to develop applications, it was a no-go. The game is a 2D puzzle, where you slide rows or columns of tiles across the screen. Tiles that move through the edges of the screen appear on the opposite side, so it is a bit like a Rubik's cube. I've created three modes so far: level mode, random mode and picture mode. In level mode, you need to play through a few predefined and increasingly difficult levels. In random mode, a random level is generated. Picture mode is similar to random mode, but you can play with a picture selected from your photo album! Developing applications for Android is a bit weird when you're used to developing PHP scripts and windows applications, but I got used to it very quickly as everything seems quite logical. Google did a great job at documenting everything and also, stackoverflow helped a bit here and there. When I feel the game is done, I'll upload it to the Android market, probably for free - I'm not sure yet. Anyway, let me know what you think about it! (screenshots)

Another small update for Music Importer

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:44:05 +0200

I finally pinned down a bug that's been bothering me for a while. Some music files don't have their "album artist" field filled. Music Importer expected this field and therefor crashed with these files. This bug is now fixed as it will use the "performer" or "artist" field if no "album artist" is given. Check it out on the Music Importer page and let me know what you think!

And a dream comes true!

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:07:00 +0200

For the last eight years, I only missed Beeckestijnpop once. It is one of the things I look out for each year and it unofficially kicks off the festival season. In that eight years, I always dreamed of playing on that main stage and now that dream came true! We played an awesome show and I saw a lot of people rocking out and a few others wearing an Against All Odds T-shirt! It felt great! After our show, we got a call from 3voor12. A band that was scheduled to play a session, had to cancel, and they asked if we could come and play in their place. We didn't hesitate and got there as quickly as we could. We played two songs behind the Beeckestijn manor and in front of their camera as a crowd of about 40 people had gathered around us. So that was a nice surprise for us on top of the awesome day it already was! Simultaneously with Beeckestijn, we released our promo for 2010 with two newly recorded songs. They can be listened to and downloaded from the music section on the Against All Odds website or from our Bandcamp page.

Against All Odds won the IJmond Popprijs

Mon, 03 May 2010 10:18:48 +0200

Wow, what an exciting weekend this was! Last Thursday we've played the IJmond Popprijs finals in a crowed Witte Theater in IJmuiden and the jury thought we were the best band of the evening. We've won three gigs: one at the Nozem en de Non, one at Wijkerpop and the main prize: a gig at the main stage of the Beeckestijn pop festival! The day after was Queens day. We had a last-minute show at Café Briljant in Haarlem. Before we got there, we thought we would be playing in the corner of some kind of pub, but it turned out to be an awesome big stage on a square in front of a church where a lot of people were rocking out (probably because they were drunk ;) ). We're going to take it easy this month, writing some new songs for the following gigs, next month at the BukBuk, Merv's and Beeckestijnpop!

Small update for Music Importer

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:33:32 +0200

I've made a minor change to the Music Importer. You are now able to keep the original files when restructuring them (ie copying them in stead of moving.) You can find and download the updated version on the Music Import software page.

FAQ about Paddock

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:08:16 +0200

The installation of Paddock is not quite intuitive. You need to rename some files, change some variables and add the table structures to the database by hand. I know this immediately scares off a lot of users, but hey, it was originally made for a friend of mine from the Dutch Racing League and I didn't think someone else would want to use it. :) To help more people setup paddock, I've created a page for it with a FAQ! It explains all the issues that people mailed my about. If you still get stuck, please don't hesitate to mail me about your problem; I'd love to help!

Busy month with three AAO shows

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:56:00 +0200

Playing at the Nozem en de Non for the IJmond Popprijs with Against All Odds was a blast! We were selected to play as the last band and got the crowd rocking on their feet. The jury gave us an awesome report and we are going to the finals at het Witte Theater in IJmuiden! Check out the photos. With the IJmond Popprijs finals at 29 april, this will be a busy month for us. Our first show is this friday at the Asgard in Beverwijk together with The Loss. The second is on saturday 24 april at the BukBuk in Heiloo with The Loss (again), Jude and Cellphyll. Be sure to check out at least one of the shows!

Against All Odds to play in Lokaal tonight

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:39:25 +0100

Tonight we're playing the first of a few gigs together with electronic rock/metal band The Loss from Alkmaar. We'll be playing at our local pub Café Lokaal at around 21:00 and The Loss will start playing around an hour later. If you are unable to be there tonight, then don't worry. The Loss and us will be playing together at two more shows in the near future. We've also been selected for the IJmond popprijs and are playing on 20 march in de Nozem en de Non. This should be a great show, since it is on a big stage, like last year!

Picking up Smash Battle development

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:46:27 +0100

We've had a few moments of spare time to work on Smash Battle again. As Jeroen created a new snow/ice theme for the levels, I went on and made a beginning of the single player portion. The single player missions can now be created from our level editor and they can be played within the game. The only problem is, that we still only have one enemy, a small chick which you can stomp on. So the next thing we should do is make some more enemies and figure out what we want them to do. Then we'll be able to design some more levels and we might just get a beta version out! While you wait for this beta version, check out the photos of an arcade cabinet running Smash Battle on our screenshots section!

Worst gig in a long time...

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:38:01 +0100

So we played in the finals, last Friday. And we were quite confident, because we had a blast the week before. But everything went wrong. A sound engineer who was too late, (he walked in, when we were almost finished!) cables that went loose, mics that were not working, etc. For me, it was the worst gig in a very long time. I can't even remember the last time things went that bad. But on the upside: we won a trophy for the third place and 25 euros which we can spend in a music store. Ah well... next time better.

Against All Odds to play in Til Trofee finals

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:45:02 +0100

Our first show with Evelien was a success. A lot of our friends that came to see us were head banging and everyone seemed to enjoy our performance. Although we did not win from the other band Glorybox, we are still going to the finals because they are unable make it. That officially makes us the underdog for the battle, but a really small chance is better than nothing at all. And besides, music is not a competition; it's not about winning, but about playing a gig. Jans brother Richard filmed our entire show, last friday. You can watch the videos on the Against All Odds website.

Some shows with Against All Odds

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:08:47 +0100

Now we are settled a bit with our new singer, it is time for the first show with her. The first one will be at de Til in Haarlem on 8 january. This is for band competition de Til Trofee, which is for bands who didn't get selected for the Rob Acda Awards. After that we'll be player two other shows together with electronic rock/metal band The Loss from Alkmaar. The first one will be at cafe Lokaal in Heemskerk on 25 february and the second one is at cafe Asgard on 9 april. Be sure to check that out if you are in the neighborhood!

Wilma leaves Bootleg

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:02:58 +0100

Sad news yesterday. Wilma decided to leave my cover band Bootleg because she didn't agree on the direction the band was going. Too bad, because she really has a great voice. We will keep on going with only four of us, but are all a little bit shocked by the sudden decision. Good luck with whatever you'll be doing, Wilma!

My coverband now also has a website

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:34:12 +0100

After I created a website for my rockband Against All Odds, I couldn't stay behind with a website for my coverband Bootleg. I copied the same backend, but tweaked the color scheme a bit and translated all the public viewable text to dutch, since we only want to focus on audience from the Netherlands. Check out the result on bootleg-band.nl!

New Against All Odds songs with Evelien singing

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:01:18 +0100

Roughly three weeks after Evelien joined Against All Odds, we've recorded some new songs. The two songs can be played from the band website. EDIT 3/11: I've created a new, more balanced mix with a better reverb effect on the vocals and a less schrill sounding solo. Go check it out!

My new game corner

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:40:31 +0200

Since we've bought a house and moved into it last Saturday, I've created a nice new game corner. (Old situation) Thats a Samsung LE32B550 TV, with some Logitech X550 surround speakers and a Creative DDTS-100 decoder. An XBox 360, Nintendo Super NES and Nintendo GameCube! All I need now is a big new couch to sit in, while gaming!

New website and vocalist for Against All Odds

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:36:57 +0200

I finally decided to finish the website for Against All Odds. It still needs a bit of work like a new banner in the top, but I thought it good enough to go online. Let me know what you think about how it looks and feels. EDIT: We also have a new vocalist since last week: Evelien Hoffmann. We did a photoshoot after that and here is one of them! I also changed the banner in the top on our website. Check it out!

New Smash Battle beta release

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:30:15 +0200

Today, we've released a new beta of Smash Battle. Among the updates are stereo sound, redone input code, some new levels, characters and an airstrike powerup! We've also made a video of Jeroen and I playing a duel. The windows installer and zip or the source can be obtained from the download section of our development blog.

Smash Battle: Handling player input

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:42:05 +0200

About two weeks ago, I wrote an article on how the player input is handled in Smash Battle. It basically tells what the GameInput class does and how to use it. It might be useful if you're working on a C++/SDL project, or just to get an insight in how Smash Battle handles its input. EDIT: Smash Battle has also been featured on two sites, the Linux Game Tome and Pixel Prospector, which is a site that collects quality freeware games. We're honored! :)

A few Smash Battle updates

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:50:48 +0200

After the last release, last july, we haven't been sitting still. We've been finished the following updates for smash battle: Four additional characters Stereo sound "Press start" at the beginning of the game (which causes the player, who does this, to have control over what gamemode and level is being played) Jump-in character select, which means that when you can select your character, players can press start to join in A few minor bug fixes... as usual ;) And last but certainly not least: We've started to work on the single player portion! I've also created a very basic level editor, but it's still really buggy, so I might release it later on. Jeroen has started to set up this weblog for Smash Battle, where we will post more updates about the development of the game, as soon as the weblog is setup and working. The old version from july is available to download at our project page on sourceforge. For the new version... you'll just have to wait until we've finished creating the single player!

My company has a new website

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:27:35 +0200

A new website, made by me and my colleague. The approach was to make an interactive and graphic website with a lot of fancy stuff going on, as if it was a flash site, without flash. This was our first big website which depended heavily on the javascript library jQuery. So if you're interested in where I work, what my other colleagues produce or the website itself, then check out our company website! EDIT: I've also created a iPhone and mobile version!

Smash Battle big update!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:30:12 +0200

Since last version, from last year, we've been working on a lot of updates which include the following: Three and four player battles New characters and stages Character stats (speed, weight, weapon and bomb) Destroyable levels Bouncing level tiles (when hit from below) Instant kill bullets Play ends after 5 rounds and shows a ending screen with statistics Keyboard and joystick can now be redefined Completely redone and/or re-factored a lot of classes and code It's available for download here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smashbattle/ The next thing we will be working on is a single player, which include some missions. This is still in planning phase, but we've got some really nice ideas about what we are going to do with it. Stay tuned!

Geek Launcher and Faceplant fun

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:39:34 +0200

The last bug and feature request are closed and released in Geek Launcher 1.0beta3. The bug was, that you could not uninstall geek launcher when it was running. The feature request was URIs. You can now launch a website, ftp-site or telnet session. We also had some fun last week when we created a new Faceplant song. We did not have the time to scream in some vocals, but the beginning is there. It contains a speech from the dutch tv show 'Alfred J Kwak', where the evil black crow Dolf is talking about his own rasict political party. We found it to be quite funny as it is a show for children we watched when we were all young. You can listen to it on our myspace. The song is called Dolf.

Geek Launcher beta 2 update

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:20:57 +0100

After I submitted my project to sourceforge, last week, thing went quite fast. The people over at sourceforge accepted my project submission in one day, while this usualy takes 3 to 5 days. And they put my news item on their frontpage, which caused my project to become quite popular in a short matter of time. Someone at softpedia apperantly got notice of this and added geek launcher, music importer and mp3 renamer to their software database. They also tested my software for malware and found out that it does not contain any (of course). As of now, the geek launcher has been downloaded 161 times from sourceforge and 30 times from softpedia. I also released the second beta version of geek launcher. You can now select if you want a large or a small user interface and you can now browse with the page up, page down, home and end keys. I also fixed a bug which caused windows to hang on shutdown. Go check it out.

Geek Launcher

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:43:10 +0100

I'm always trying to find new ways to improve my productivity while working with PC's. One of my mayor bottlenecks is the ability to start applications with a few keystrokes. For example: I use PuTTy at least 5 times per day. After fiddling around with WinKey, which worked quite well, I still wanted some more. Thats why I started creating my own new launcher application. It is called 'Geek Launcher', because probably only geeks (and maybe speed-freaks) are going to use it. You can download the first beta version here: geeklauncher-1.0beta.exe and can view the sourcecode here through websvn or normal SVN: http://svn.demontpx.com/GeekLauncher

Photobook and Faceplant

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:38:36 +0200

Another few days of coding has passed and I created a new photobook area on my site. I'll start uploading some photos in the following days from lowlands and ieperfest, but also from other events and parties that has passed and are still to come. Also check out our new little grindcore project called Faceplant. Our first song, which you can listen if you click on the link, is a grindcore version of Kortjakje. We're planning to produce a bit more serious grindcore songs in the near future.

The Maxtor problem

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:26:46 +0200

After two years, my server crashed last sunday. Of course it was due to the failing Maxtor hard drive. And this is where I must say that all six Maxtor's I've owned, all crashed within two years, with the exception of one, which survived 4 years. So please people, do not buy a Maxtor. It's a waste of money. Please spend a bit more and buy a much better Western Digital or something! And now I'm going to convert my old maxtor into a nice ashtray :).

Stupid German cunts

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:52:47 +0200

So we went to drive to Germany, last Thursday, to visit the With Full Force festival. And we drove for 10 hours and 700 kilometers to get there. While we were waiting in the line to get in, we fired off some really small fireworks called ice fountains, Mark bought at a gas station, underway. One of the security guys of the festival saw us do that, but didn't say or do anything. After we waited for 5 hours in that line, we reached the beginning of the line and the security men told us that we could not get in, because we were firing off the fireworks. He told us that they were forbidden in Germany. We tried to discuss with the security men, but they were determined to kick us away. There was nothing we could do. We drove all the way for nothing. After that we immediately drove back home. We've been in that car for 24 hours and over 1400 kilometers :(.

New camera

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:34:19 +0200

Just bought a new camera, friday. A Sony Cybershot DSC-W35 for the festivals and parties of course.

Family domain

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:29:56 +0200

This week I parked the domain name famhekman.nl for the members of my family, because the private photopage of Kars (my nephew) was not reachable through a simple URL anymore. The photopage is now reachable through kars.famhekman.nl My parents now also have a weblog, which makes them fully web 2.0 ready.

Back to the old blog

Fri, 11 May 2007 13:48:38 +0200

Because we had nothing more to tell about our house, I decided to revert to my old weblog. And maybe, I'll be posting something here, sometimes.. When I feel like it.